A series of press releases is now hitting the newswires worldwide, bringing major hope to the refugees hurdling via the Aegean from Turkey to Greece, via Serbia to Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and all the way to Sweden, France and the United Kingdom.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, whose Government is proud to represent the entire Islamic Umma, and who has just received 150 billion dollars via the Iran deal, has magnanimously offered to absorb all the three million refugees now frustrated at the borders of several European countries. The Supreme Guide ordered the earmarking of 15 of the 150 billion dollars, a mere 10%, to be granted for the resettlement of the refugees, not just from Syria but also from any parts of the Middle East and North Africa, in multiple regions inside Iran, including on the beautiful less inhabited coasts of the Caspian sea and the southern coasts on the Indian Ocean. The Islamic Republic gesture would in one shot solve the entire crisis of the refugees by absorbing them as migrants among their brothers and sisters in Iran.

Competing in generosity, the Emirate of Qatar declared that it won’t allow Iran to beat the Arabs and the Sunnis in absorbing the refugees. Doha stated that it is allocating ten billion petrodollars for the resettlement of 5 million refugees within the borders of the principality. “We have been funding the struggle in Syria, Libya and Iraq for all these years. It is time to open our arms to the people of these countries and have them share our resources,” the statement said.

But beyond the Middle East, a surprising declaration issued in the Kremlin informed the Europeans and the world that all refugees and migrants, currently stuck on borders, should head east towards the Russian borders. Russia is the largest country in the world, said the statement. We have the largest production of oil in half of the planet. We can absorb the entire populations of Syria, Iraq, Libya, and a half a dozen African countries between the Ural Mountains and Vladivostok. It is all empty. They won’t even be noticed from space. We can send our gigantic logistical machine with Antonovs and trucks to Eastern Ukraine to meet the refugees and ship them east towards beautiful lower Siberia.

Frustrated that very few migrants have been heading to Ireland, the Irish government said they will assume their share. “Ireland is empty; we can absorb a million or so.” Venezuela’s Maduro declared he will happily fund two to three million refugees in his country. We have oil, we have land; we can share.” In South America, a tsunami of requests is emerging: Bolivia and Ecuador’s progressive leaders are urging the United Nations to help them host a million migrants each, as an expression of their humanity. But Brazil issued the most compelling call: “We can greet another thirty million migrants into our country.”

The world has woken up today a little bit more humane. Humanity is more compassionate. And the more compassionate in this world are the ones volunteering for an open arms policy. But in Syria and in Iraq, ISIS and the Jihadists are still beheading and raping. And in Syria the dictator continues to drop the barrels of death on his people. In Libya, the Jihadists continue to kill and maim. None of the “compassionates” mentioned above has offered to free these three countries from terror and end the plight of people fleeing from their ancestral lands. Actually, we are still checking the veracity of the magnanimous statements reported above. It may have just been an excess of imagination…
This essay can be catalogued as “sarcasm in international relations”

Dr Walid Phares is the author of The Lost Spring

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here